How to Blog: Form a Strong Emotional Bond with Your Readers

Write Blog Posts That Get Read, Shared, and Remembered

Do you know how to blog? Or do have trouble getting people to read your blog posts?

You’ve done what the big players tell you to do:

Post every week.

Format your posts for scanners.

Write a great headline.

Yet still, you struggle to get anyone interested in your writing.

What’s missing?

An emotional bond with your reader.

“Great,” you groan. “I thought I was doing that already.”

It’s not that you haven’t tried. You’ve got enthusiasm, don’t you? Doesn’t that count for something?

Absolutely.

While your passion is good and will make your work more interesting — it may not be enough to light a fire in your reader’s heart. Honestly, it’s only one side of the coin.

“Okay, I get that,” you say. “So how do I make a powerful connection with my readers if passion isn’t the key?”

The Biggest Obstacle You Put In Your Way

Here’s the problem. When you focus on your passion, you focus on yourself.

Think about that.

Sure, you need passion to get through the long, dark days of waiting and wondering whether anyone will ever care.

Passion will help you learn what you need to know to make a difference in the world.

What it won’t do is show you how to transfer your feelings, your interests, and your desires to your readers.

The key that opens the door to your reader’s heart is a servant’s heart.

A servant’s heart will:

Prove to others you’re not just milking them for cash.

Open doors mere passion will not.

Combine with passion to help you reach your goals.

Now let’s take a look at how you can apply that to your next blog post.

The Secret Sauce of Immediate Emotional Connections

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Emotions are universal. Experience is not.

Last September, I heard Marsha Shandur, a storytelling coach, make this profound statement:

People may not have had every experience, but they’ve experienced every emotion.

I haven’t been a lumberjack. I don’t know dink about how to fix a car. I can’t perform brain surgery. And to be honest, I don’t want to do any of those things.

I have been mad when some friends we invited for dinner didn’t show up, call, or even express remorse. My chest hurt when a friend buried her 23-year-old daughter last year. I jumped for joy when my 2 poems won first place in a school-wide competition.

Remember that the best part of the story is the emotional element. We can identify with the hero’s frustration, fear, and jubilation — even if we can’t fly or see through walls like he can.

Throw some emotion into your writing. Your reader will feel it, too. If she feels it deeply enough, she’ll tell everyone she knows what a great writer you are!

Tell stories, lots of stories.

If you’re a fiction writer, this is a no-brainer.

What if you write nonfiction? Do you really need to tell stories?

Only if you want to engage your reader.

How do you like to learn something? Would you rather take a seat in an auditorium with a professor behind the podium pontificating great pearls of wisdom?

Unless you’re a glutton for punishment, I bet you’d rather take a nap.

Here’s a better way. Invite someone you admire to coffee or lunch. It will be just you and that person enjoying good food and conversation. What could be better than that? Especially if you’re an introvert!

Stories are like coffee with a friend. They invite you in. They give you a thrill. And they teach you without being overt about it.

If you want to persuade people, start with a story. Then people will start persuading themselves long before you do.

So what makes a good story?

Give the hero a big challenge to overcome.

Let your reader see the hero’s flaws as well as his strengths.

Make it seem impossible for the hero to come out a winner.

Just like a rollercoaster makes you scream, a story brimming with adventure will set you on the edge of your seat.

Pave your sales path with little yeses.

You don’t ask someone to marry you after you say, “Hi, my name is Frank.”

It takes time for someone to get to know you well enough to even agree to go to dinner. And even then it might take a few conversations to warm the other person up to the idea.

It’s the same when you go to the doctor. He doesn’t greet you at the door and say, “You’ve got cancer.” He asks you questions. He probes — but not intrusively. He’s trying to help, gain your trust, and restore your health. It’s only after you trust him that you let him cut you open.

You’ve got lots of chances along the way to get agreement with your ideas. Every time you do, those yeses combine to create momentum that will get you the big yes in the end.

Give the gift of hope.

There’s one thing we all have in common.

We’re all looking for hope.

Here’s how that looks:

When you’re fed up with your job, you hope you can hold out until next year or the day you retire.

When you’re happy with your life, you hope that feeling will last forever.

When you’re grieving, you hope that someday the intense pain you feel now will pass.

When we feel our hope is gone, we start looking for another hope to replace it. You see, hope is essential to life. Without it, we waste away and die.

Hope is water to someone dying of thirst. It’s a loving embrace for someone who feels alone and forgotten. And hope is wealth to those mired in poverty.

Give the gift of hope — and do it sincerely. When you do, you’ll have more influence than all the persuasion techniques in the world will give you.